


Roses and Pale Wine

by Missy



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Genre: Backstory, Bargaining, Bitterness, Curses, Gen, Magic, Pre-Canon, Reluctant Friendships, SoW: Spooky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 12:29:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20866244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: Inhospitality is a punishable crime in her world.





	Roses and Pale Wine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveradept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/gifts).

Once there was a woman.

Beautiful. Ethereally so. With weeds for hair and long, ruby red talons for nails. She was not simply known for her beauty – if that were all she drew attention for, she would have folded herself up and disappeared into the ether, like a fall leaf turning to mulch.

No, the woman was incredibly clever. She understood how to create a bargain and how to manage it. The twelve-mile toll road between kingdoms was her realm. She understood quite well that what she did was boundary trespassing, but she cared more about the message than the rules.

The king and queen had been, in a word, inhospitable to all. She had heard rumors that the kingdom was going bankrupt under his constant quest to start or continue various wars; she knew that he spent years away on pilgrimages, leaving his wife alone with the castle to run and the people to care for. Their short sharpness might have been understood, these were trying and tense times, but their crudeness in turning her out to the cold and elements remained unforgivable. They had laughed at gifts simply created and brought.

Their boy was different. Underneath his surly manners, there was something interesting to him. A sense of buried kindness in how he spoke to the servants. Dark humor in his laugh, and a flare for the melodramatic.

But she remembered their rudeness. She could tolerate many things – had, in her time, from the press of hot stones upon her back to a shower of offal upon her hot cheeks. 

All had paid in the end. And so would they.

The plague arrived and left, touching only those who had shown her cruelty, though in the panic of nosegays and smoke, none noticed. The boy was in charge of the throne – about to come into manhood – when she returned.

He did not recognize her, though she wore the same cowl. And when he repeated the sins of his parents, she could not stop the curse’s magic.

And did not want to, were she honest with herself.

Pity. She did sympathize with him.

** 

Once there was a woman.

And he would remember her, bitterly, as yearly the roses bloomed and died.


End file.
